CDs/DVDs
joe.muggs
Antwerp band dEUS – built around the core of Tom Barman and Klaas Janzoons – started out as a very interesting band. They fully leaned into the anything-goes sector of 90s music where the likes of Beck, Beastie Boys, Björk, Moloko and Super Furry Animals kicked away genre fences and got their weird on.Later, they got a bit Big Indie, with big, sweeping, widescreen songs that put them closer to Doves and Elbow and guaranteed them nice festival slots. Significantly less interesting, but packed with accomplishment and emotional heft, and definitely deserving of ongoing success.Now, though, over Read more ...
Cheri Amour
I’ll admit it. When I first saw that noughties indie rockers Bloc Party would be supporting Grammy award-winning emo stars Paramore on their Spring stadium tour, it seemed like a perplexing choice. But, four minutes into hearing the return sounds from the Nashville natives and the crossover is palpable. Former single "The News" is just as sharp as Kele Okereke’s helicopter blades when it comes to cutting up the indie dancefloor.The record – which marks Paramore’s sixth album to date - builds on the sparkling pop of its predecessor. Not surprising given it’s the first to be made with the Read more ...
Tom Carr
It would seem that we’ve been overdue a dose of that awkward teens years nostalgia as all three of Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and their UK Emo/Pop-punk counterparts You Me At Six come back bearing new, angst infused music.For You Me At Six, their career so far has been forever attached to that unmistakable genre, yes, but to their credit they’ve always strived to expand their sound and develop as a band. To label them as the pre-eminent UK emo group doesn’t quite give them the right credit or tell the whole story.Although reliably successful on tour, after their first three albums propelled them Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In this context, what’s named “diamond road” is a metaphor for staying on course rather than, as the lyrics of the song “Diamond Road” put it, letting yourself go or sprawling all over the floor. Follow this route and life won’t be a mess.Barefoot On Diamond Road is the third album from the Netherlands’s Amber Arcades, the recording persona of Annelotte de Graaf. Away from music, her work as a lawyer has brought a role in the international war crimes tribunal. Previously, her music was a form of Eighties-ish indie with touches of shoegazing. Beyond her glass-like voice, guitar was a main Read more ...
David Nice
It’s coming up for two years since some of us watched the first three seasons of what’s increasingly coming to seem like television’s greatest dramatic triumph. Babylon Berlin. So we might be excused for being in a bit of brainwhirl when it comes to the multiple plotlines sown early on in Season Four.It starts on the eve of 1931, and the components include desperate street children, suppression of free press, the increasingly deluded exploits of a mad industrialist family, fratricidal urges, a vicious secret court, bent coppers, gangsters, the theft of a valuable jewel, connecting high Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Yo La Tengo’s new disc would appear to be an homage to the indie scene of the mid 1980s: a place before baggy beats became the groove du jour and where dancing with wild abandon was somewhat of a rare occurrence. Indeed, in This Stupid World maudlin and distracted vocals, fuzzy guitars and spacey vibes predominate on tunes that seem to be, with a couple of exceptions, firmly aimed at the head rather than the hips.This Stupid World may be a bit of a juvenile title, but it actually marks some 40 years since Yo La Tengo first got together in Hoboken, New Jersey and a couple of years since their Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Shania Twain describes her sixth studio album as “a song of gratitude and appreciation. I was inspired that I still had air in my lungs” – and it certainly is a hi-energy affair, a long way from The Woman in Me, the sophomore outing that established her as “the queen of country-pop”. Twain’s come a long way from the mining and lumbering towns of her Ontario childhood – literally and metaphorically, for home is now on Lake Geneva.It's surprising to pause and consider that she’s made so big an impact with so few albums over almost 30 years, though of course Twain has also been busy with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Waeve is the debut album from life partners Rose Elinor Dougall (long ago in The Pipettes) and Graham Coxon (of Blur), working with James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco), who co-produces and provides occasional bits of instrumentation. Their album is a woozy thing, underpinned with analogue synths and elegant Krautrockin’ rhythms, emanating a mystic melancholia. The sound is luscious but the whole could maybe do with a little more oomph.Perhaps that’s not the point. Perhaps this listener’s opinion has been skewed by expectations based on the garage sneer of their great debut single, last Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lisa O’Neill is a part of the new wave of Irish contemporary folk artists, one that encompasses the likes of Lankum, Ye Vagabonds and John Francis Flynn, all of them putting their albums out on Rough Trade, which makes the venerable English Indie label something of a centre for what the present and future of Irish folk music sounds like. (Lankum’s Radie Peat and O’Neill have also sung together, on the excellent “Factory Girl”, part of the showcase This Ain’t No Disco.)All of This Is Chance is O’Neill’s first release through Rough Trade, and her fourth album since the self-released Has An Read more ...
graham.rickson
Watching these harrowing films in rapid succession allows us to watch a great director’s confidence develop at close hand; though 1955’s A Generation (Pokolenie) is an impressive debut for a 27-year old director, both Kanał (1957) and 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) really show Wajda’s technique taking flight.The three films are thematically linked but don’t share any characters, tracing life in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1942 until the end of the European conflict in 1945. The opening sequence of A Generation shows a bombed-out Warsaw slum. Tadeusz Łomnicki’s teenage anti-hero Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Reflections on how the past relates to now suffuse The Candle and the Flame. The album’s closing track is “When I Was a Young Man.” When he was 21, sings Robert Forster, “I wrote songs, I was unsung, unheralded and undone”. His figurative brothers David and Lou showed him the way. Now in his mid-Sixties, he has a considerable artistic inventory to look back on. Including The Go-Betweens, solo albums, his writing. Messrs Bowie and Reed would be proud of what they helped initiate.However, this is not the source of such retrospection. The Candle and the Flame’s opener “She’s a Fighter” lays it Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A Short Diary, a duo album for piano and drums, contains music of astonishing directness, calm and concentration. The story of how it came into being is fascinating, but it also stands on its own as pure music of luminous quality, and is bound to be in quite a few year-end lists.The full title is “a short diary (of loss)”. Drummer Sebastian Rochford found consolation after the death of his father, the Aberdeen poet Gerard Rochford (1932-2019) in writing music. He has said: “music just seemed to come to me, sing inside me every, day, sometimes even as I woke.” The album is dedicated to the Read more ...